MBR and GPT are two common partitioning formats of computer hard disk. An MBR (short for Master Boot Record) disk can support at most 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions plus 1 extended partition. And the size of single partition can amount to 2TB. GPT – GUID Partition Table, is a new standard of disk partition table. It can support up to 128 partitions in Windows and the size of the largest partition is 18 EB. What’s more, GPT has backup partition table which is a deficiency in MBR. These are the main differences between MBR and GPT disk. To get to know more of their differences, view GPT VS. MBR.

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As a very ordinary computer user, you may have heard a lot about disks and partitions, but you may be unfamiliar with partition table. All you can know directly is:
a). the disk is not working normally;
b). disk partition suddenly becomes inaccessible;
c). disk partitions are missing somehow.

To tell you the truth, those are closely related to a unit called partition table. So what is partition table exactly? It is actually a table maintained on disk by operating system to describe the partition layout on that disk. When partition table is deleted or damaged, corresponding disk partitions will be implicated. At this time, people will make every effort to find ways to recover partition table.

When it comes to GPT disk, you may ask what GPT is. GPT is short for GUID Partition Table which is a partition type. And it is a part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface specification, and it is used to replace master boot record (MBR) partition table which uses 32 bits in BIOS system to store the logical block address and size information. As of 2010, most operating systems support GPT, thereinto, Mac OS X system only support booting GPT partitions with EFI firmware.

MBR and GPT are two disk styles, and they differ from each other in many aspects. MBR is short for Master Boot Record, on which you can create at most four primary partitions OR three primary partitions plus one extended partition. In this case, if you want to create more partitions, you can create more logical partitions in the extended partition. Besides, if you employ MBR disk, the maximum disk capacity Windows can make use of is 2TB.

As we all know, there are three kinds of partition on an MBR disk: primary partition, extended partition, and logical partition. Generally speaking, a basic MBR disk supports at most four primary partitions, or up to three primary partitions plus one extended partition. The extended partition cannot be used directly until it is divided into logical partitions. Primary partitions can be converted to logical partition and vice versa. Well, why do users need to set partition as primary and how to convert logical partition to primary partition?

Have you encountered such a problem? When there are four primary partitions on a MBR hard disk, and you want to create more partitions, but Windows doesn’t allow doing such an operation. Once you meet it, how to solve?

In this case, it is due to the limitation of MBR. As you know, MBR disk is a disk type which only supports four primary partitions or three primary partitions plus extended partition. If there are already four primary partitions, if you use Disk Management to create a new simple on unallocated space, you will receive a message “You cannot create a new volume in this unallocated space because the disk already contains the maximum number of partitions”. But you want to create more partitions, so in order to achieve this aim, some of you choose to convert MBR disk to GPT. This post will offer you another solution, that is to change primary to logical and then create a new partition.

As most users know, the partition table is responsible for the displaying of partitions and data inside. According to Wikipedia, “a partition table is a table maintained on disk by the operating system describing the partitions on that disk”. In summary, partition table is very important for disk.

Yet, a lot of people saying they come across invalid partition table error in Windows 7. We think you’ll agree when I say: invalid partition table error is troublesome.